Penetrating critiques : emasculated empire and Victorian identity in Africa / Leslie Allin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allin, Leslie, 1984- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Masculinity in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 p.)

Place of Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : University of Toronto Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"Tracing the intersections between archival documents and immensely popular adventure fiction set in Africa, Penetrating Critiques highlights the anxieties surrounding the vulnerability of the white male body by assessing the destabilization of narrative itself. The author considers texts ranging from private letters, governmental correspondence, periodicals, and archives to the popular works of H. Rider Haggard, Richard Marsh, and Joseph Conrad. These texts trouble the notions of bounded male bodies, impermeable histories, and solid virtues while underscoring the grotesqueness of male forms, narratives, and moralities. Although dominant representations of martial bodies frequently emphasized boundaries, containment, and solidity, the fiction and imperial archives explored in this book expose problems of stability through tropes, images, and material evidence of perforation, penetration, and dissolution. In emphasizing the relationship between institutional imperial writing and popular discourse, Penetrating Critiques reveals that more complex, fraught, and critical approaches to imperialism and masculinity were circulating throughout Victorian culture than previously recognized. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part III: Modernist Dissolutions

5 Bodily Disintegrations: Forensic Exposure and the Human Leopard Society in Sierra Leone

6 Expanding Darkness: Narrative Complicity

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Cover

Copyright

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bodies/Spaces/Texts

British Masculinity and the Failure of Colonial Efficacy

Part I: Ruptures in Adventure Romance

1 Permeable Boundaries: Violence and Fantasy in Zululand

2 H. Rider Haggard's Inversions: Vulnerability and the Narrative Volatility of Imperial Romance

Part II: Gothic Penetrations

3 Transgression and Loss: General Gordon and Gothic Imagination

4 Marsh's Perforations: Desire, Imperial Decay, and the Narrative Instability of The Beetle

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4875-1342-9

1-4875-1341-0

OCLC:

1150919374